Marketplace Tech

There’s been a lot of doom and gloom in the tech sector in recent years — the feeling that so many of the advances in internet connectivity, social media and now artificial intelligence might have caused more harm than good, increasing the need for at least caution in the industry and even, possibly, government intervention. But lately a backlash to the backlash has been brewing among techno-optimists. Their movement is called effective accelerationism, a play on the effective altruism community, and its supporters argue that unrestricted technological progress is a force for positive change. It’s received more attention since Donald Trump won the 2024 election. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Nadia Asparouhova, a writer and researcher who’s been following the rise of the effective accelerationist subculture, often shortened to e/acc.

It’s Inauguration Day, and a veritable who’s who of tech are in attendance for the swearing in of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. The massive presence of tech leaders, overtly supporting or just making nice with Trump, represents a stunning reversal from his first term. Today, we’re looking back at what happened in between. President Joe Biden was often seen as taking an adversarial approach to the tech industry.

On this week’s Marketplace “Tech Bytes,” we’ll dive into President Joe Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence plus a request Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made to President-elect Donald Trump. But first, tech news site The Information reported that TikTok plans to completely shut down its app in the U.S. on Sunday and will instead direct users to a website where they can read about the platform’s ban. According to that reporting, TikTok will allow American users to download their data — and, if the ban is overturned down the road, those users will be granted access to it immediately. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams is joined by Maria Curi, tech policy reporter at Axios, to break down these stories.

California relies on a variety of tools to stop and mitigate wildfires, some as low-tech as dumping giant buckets of seawater on the flames. But on the higher-tech side is a new, AI-powered monitoring system called ALERTCalifornia, which was developed at the University of California, San Diego. It’s designed to speedily detect and report wildfires using a network of over 1,000 cameras and sensors. The developers say the network detected over 1,200 blazes across the state during the 2023 fire season, sometimes with impressive quickness. But the system wasn’t quick enough to prevent the current disaster in Los Angeles. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams spoke with Cyrus Farivar, a senior writer at Forbes, who explored how the fury of the Palisades fire overwhelmed that human-made system.